Connectivity, Communications & Cloud News - Page 35

He also expressed the view that the concerns raised about personal privacy on the new Street View feature on Google Maps was largely tied to the novelty of the products and a lack of understanding about the nature and frequency of the intrusion. Street View is a free online feature that gives users a continuous ground-level street panorama.

"We went through a cycle with satellite imagery where it was new and there was some level of concern and then some level of hyped-up concern, I would say, about what it means," he said.

"And as people came to understand about what satellite imagery did and about what it didn't [do], that level of concern went down and, as people began to appreciate the value it brought to them, that became effectively a non-issue.

"If you know that this satellite can come over maybe once a year and it takes a picture, that's different from believing there's an eye in the skye that can follow wherever you go all of the time."

Storage junkies, your dreams have just been made into reality. Addonics has just introduced a marvelous new piece of kit, the simple-yet-useful Network Attached Storage Adapter. This little box enables any USB hard drive to be placed onto a network for network access, essentially turning your stale USB HDDs into NAS drives. The device supports both SMB (Server Message Block) and the open source Samba network protocols, which allows for cross-platform access of shared data for most versions of OS X, Windows and Linux. For users not directly connected over the LAN, the adapter provides FTP access for up to eight simultaneous users anywhere in the world, and it can even be used as "a print server or as a BitTorrent file downloading appliance." Best of all? It's available right now for $55. Like we said, dream come true.

The Steam Cloud will "just work," meaning any user changes to their game options will propagate to the Cloud by default. Upon logging into Steam from another PC, these settings will be brought down from the Cloud and automatically leveraged by the game. Any configuration changes on this second machine are then synced to the Cloud for future sessions.

Steam Cloud will be available to all publishers and developers using Steam, free of charge, and Valve will add Cloud support to its back catalog of Steam games. Cloud services are compatible with games purchased via Steam, at retail, and other digital outlets.

With the new LaCinema Rugged, you'll be able to access and enjoy your files on any television. You can watch television shows and movies, listen to music, and create photo slideshows to share with your friends and family. Created for LaCie by world-famous industrial designer Neil Poulton, the LaCinema Rugged goes beyond ordinary multimedia hard disks with its sophisticated all-terrain design. It features HDMI upscaling, allowing you to watch movies and television programs on your HD TV, or even enjoy your photos in full HD resolution.

Rumour 2: Intel is holding back the specification, and not sharing with the industry.

No Intel isn't holding back the specification, the whole point of Intel investing heavily (gazillions of dollars and bazillions of man hours) into creating this 'Dummies Guide' is to enable the industry to start building USB 3.0 into their silicon as soon as possible, so why would Intel purposefully delay? One danger however of distributing an unfinished spec is the risk of incompatible hardware down the line, leading to a right mess. As an Intel specification Intel has the responsibility to insure that specifications we deliver to the industry are fully developed and mature enough for others to use. The Intel host controller spec is expected to be unveiled to the industry as soon as possible, in the second half of the year. The impatience of our fellow chipset-makers (as described in the press) to leverage Intel's investment and begin to design great USB 3.0 supporting devices of their own is however very encouraging and should aid a fast USB 3.0 adoption ramp.

Could anyone invest the necessary time and money to create such a host controller specification? Of course they could - but with Intel's Industry stewardship in sharing our spec the industry doesn't have to make the additional time and resource commitment.